Alpha, Beta & Snapshots Discussions (Fedora 11 Only)Post Development Version comments and questions that don't belong in Bugzilla here. These posts will be moved or deleted once the Final version is released

Fedora 11 Alpha was finally made available to public last week after the release got delayed by 2 days. On paper, Fedora 11 brings out lot of enhancements over the previous Fedora 10. I used Fedora 11 Alpha for a week and here is my small quick review of the Alpha.

I downloaded the Live CD of Fedora 11 Alpha. After booting from the Live CD, I got the regular option to install it on the Hard disk. I quickly installed it via the Install icon & the install process was done in about 15 minutes.

Booting into Fedora 11 Alpha:

After doing the post install setup, I was forwarded on to the Desktop. The major improvement here is the KDE 4.2 desktop. Replacing the buggy 4.1, Fedora team is in right direction with KDE 4.2. The aesthetic feel of Fedora 11 is awesome with KDE 4.2 together with the Solar theme.

Performing Routine Tasks on Fedora 11 Alpha:

I was able to perform routine task without much of tweaking. I did not updated any software packages, so as to get accurate & unbiased results. I did not even install graphics driver for my Nvidia 7300GT & preferred to run with the default drivers. Fedora 11 performed all the tasks well. I burnt some DVD's, chatted using Kopete, browsed the web via Firefox, performed minor editing via Gwenview & all worked as expected.

But all the while Fedora 11 Alpha seemed laggy to me. If compared with the stable Fedora 10, it isn't so responsive. Another bug I encountered was that of corrupt graphics in system panel. The icons next to the clock in panel used to get corrupt sometimes. I don’t know the reason behind this but it maybe due to absence of graphic drivers. Apart from these, I absolutely felt at home using Fedora 11 Alpha.

Pros:

1) Very stable in Alpha. I had absolutely no crashes or kernel panics during the testing.

2) KDE 4.2 Desktop is awesome. A perfect time to jump over KDE 4 for those KDE 3.5 fanatics.

Cons:

1) Fedora 11 Alpha isn't responsive. One has to wait for a bit after clicking on anything.

2) Strange errors like 'You had a kernel panic' when connecting a USB devices at times.

3) Has minor bugs.

Conclusion:

Fedora 11 Alpha is good in spite of being in its early life period. It is stable and usable. It has long time to come before it is made into a perfect OS. The Fedora community has setup many goals for the 11th version of Fedora. At the moment they are still under progress. The beta should bring out the best of Fedora 11. At present you will just have to wait before the beta comes out. Do come back to read the review of Fedora 11 Beta soon here.

you'd expect an alpha/beta to be slow though so i cant see what your complaining about why its slow wait for Previeiw or final an then review it ..KDE4.2 startup is a bit slow but i do believe there orking on speeding it up

am a new fedora user a would like to get some some of the rpms of multimedia players like VLC,Amarok,Real player, the default movie player cant play files with .DAT extension.and again i dont have the kde libraries tha can make me install k3b cz am in genome desktop Help plis